Maya would be happy to get off and walk, but of course she can’t. This is a popular road, used by a lot of people she knows. Cars pass, beeping their horns; familiar faces, laughing and shouting things she would be happy not to be able to hear. Someone throws an empty styrofoam cup at her as they hurtle by. Someone else shouts out, “Oy! Maya! Get a husky!” Ms Kimodo waves. For Maya, to be seen pushing her pink and blue bike through the snow would be even more humiliating.

She may have frostbite. Her lungs hurt. She’s lost all feeling in her toes. She’s lost all sense of time. But still Maya pedals on. It will be worth it when she sees the looks on the faces of her friends. It’ll be worth it to see the look on Sicilee’s face as she glides onto campus, gloating, calling out, “You see, I told you I’d fix the flat!” And with any luck she will pass Cody, slouching along with Clemens, and shout out, “Hi!” and toot her cow horn.

Maya pedals up Schuyler, the last road before the school, gasping but triumphant. Usually Schuyler is full of students who live nearby, but today there is not one single person trudging through the snow, hood up, head down. Maya doesn’t wonder why. Nor does she wonder why it’s been some time since the last car honked at her as it passed. She thinks it just shows you how soft everyone is. Mollycoddled. Spoiled. So afraid of a little weather that they beg their parents to drive them just a couple of blocks because of the snow.

When she reaches the top of the hill, she stops to catch her breath. She gazes down the other side. The dark shapes of cars move steadily if slowly along the road that runs along the bottom of Schuyler like bison through a winter storm. The sidewalk should also be teeming with students, but except for two figures huddled into their parkas just stepping off the curb, it too is empty. Maya pushes off.

Maya is fortunate in three things this morning, and unfortunate in one. Her first piece of luck is that the hill is not a steep one. The second is that the two figures huddled into their parkas are Clemens and Waneeda, who are late because they’ve been standing at the gas station half a mile away with their petitions for the last hour. The unfortunate thing is that, halfway down Schuyler, her brakes fail.

“Look out!” screams Maya, sounding her horn. “Get out of the way!” And she tries not to look as the pink and blue bike freewheels her straight into traffic.

The two figures turn, but only one of them steps out of the way. The other one runs towards her.

“Jump! Jump!” shouts Clemens, lunging for her and pulling her free from the bike, which – and this is Maya’s third piece of good fortune – clatters to a stop before it reaches the end of Schuyler and is ground under the wheels of someone’s car.

“Are you all right?” Clemens helps her up.

Maya nods.

“Are you crazy?” asks Clemens. “You could’ve been killed.”

“I know.” Maya smiles at Clemens with no hint of mockery for the very first time. “You probably saved my life.”

The three of them walk the rest of the way together, Maya pushing the bike. As they turn into the school, Cody passes them in his father’s car. He turns in his seat and waves.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Waneeda and her mother have an argument that neither loses or wins

Waneeda’s mother wants to know what’s wrong with the chicken.

This is a moment Waneeda’s been dreading. She scoops up a forkful of peas. But it was as inevitable as it was dreaded. There was no way she could keep this a secret. Not without moving in with someone else. “Nothing’s wrong with it.”

Mrs Huddlesfield glowers at the untouched leg on one side of Waneeda’s plate. Mrs Huddlesfield looks as if she’s about to spit bullets. “Then why aren’t you eating it?”

Waneeda shrugs, but doesn’t raise her head to catch her mother’s accusing, gimlet eye. “Because I don’t feel like it.”

“Don’t feel like it?” Mrs Huddlesfield’s voice rises indignantly. “What do you mean, you don’t feel like it? You love chicken.”

Maybe more than Mrs Huddlesfield thinks.

“What’s the big deal?” Waneeda reaches for the bowl of salad, risking an innocent glance in her mother’s direction. “I’m eating everything else.”

“What’s the big deal?” parrots her mother. “What’s the big deal? Is that the thanks I get for working all day and racing back here to make a nice home-cooked meal for you? What’s the big deal? You think this food just walks out of the refrigerator and puts itself on the table?” Her fork, a piece of white meat pinned to it, hovers in the air. “You think everybody gets a nice home-cooked meal like you do?”

Waneeda spears a slice of tomato. “Everyone who owns a microwave and a can opener does,” she mumbles.

The fork clatters against Mrs Huddlesfield’s plate. “You can cook your own meals from now on if you think you’re so funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.” The chicken leg pushed to the far side of Waneeda’s plate has tiny veins buried in the flesh. “I just don’t feel like eating the chicken, that’s all.”

“What is this? Another one of your diets?” Mrs Huddlesfield doesn’t ask this in the kindly, affectionate way of a mother who is worried about her child’s health. She asks it as a mother who knows that no diet Waneeda has ever been on has lasted more than a few days and who automatically expects her child to fail.

“Kind of.” Waneeda has recently watched a documentary with Clemens on, among other things, factory farming (in fact, the same documentary that so efficiently emptied the auditorium last year), and now knows that, if it is true that “you are what you eat”, she is a tortured, drugged and septic pool of misery. “I’ve kind of decided to stop eating meat for a while.”

“You what?” Mrs Huddlesfield laughs the way you might if you discovered a two-headed possum in your bed – in amazement, horror and disbelief. “And why in the name of all that is right and holy would you want to do a thing like that?” Waneeda’s mother looks over at Waneeda’s father, whose attention (up until now) has been fully absorbed by what’s happening on the television screen. “Oscar!” she bellows. “Oscar! Did you hear that? Now she isn’t eating meat!”

“What?” Waneeda’s father tears his eyes from the real police-chase taking place only a few feet away in the living room. “Who isn’t eating meat?”

“She isn’t.” Mrs Huddlesfield points to the only other person at the table to clarify this statement and end any possible confusion. “Your daughter is refusing to eat meat!”

“Really?” Mr Huddlesfield snaps a chicken wing in two. “What are you going to eat if you don’t eat meat?”

“Well, you know…” says Waneeda. “I guess I’ll just have to make do with the millions of other things there are to eat besides meat.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m going to be a vegetarian.”

From the look on her father’s face, you’d think Waneeda had just announced her intention to become a mercenary.

“I’ve never heard such nonsense.” Waneeda’s father is so appalled that he has actually forgotten about the hysterical chase on the Californian highway. “Don’t you know that if we didn’t eat them there’d be no cows or pigs or sheep? We’re doing them a favour. Without us they’d die.”

“And with us they die,” counters his daughter. “Which puts them in a no-win situation.”

“Don’t be a wise guy.” Mrs Huddlesfield has retrieved her fork and is pointing it at her daughter. “You know what your father means. That’s what animals are for. For us to eat.”

“Really?” Even the leaf of lettuce on the end of Waneeda’s fork looks sceptical. “Then how come, in nature, the chicken Dad’s breaking into pieces will talk to her chicks when they’re still in their eggs? And they’ll talk back? How do you explain that? You think she’s telling them they only have seven weeks to live and then they’re supper?”

“So they talk to each other.” Mr Huddlesfield waves half a wing at her. “What’s that prove, Waneeda? That instead of eating them we should send them all to Harvard?”

“Didn’t I say she’s been acting strange, Oscar?” interrupts Waneeda’s mother. “Have you noticed how she’s stopped flushing the toilet? Did you know she threw out all my air fresheners? Even that mountain pine you like so much? And she did something with the bleach. It’s disappeared into thin air.” It’s just as well she hasn’t been looking for the toilet cleaner in the last few days. “Didn’t I say that I don’t know what’s come over her?” Although her questions seem to be directed to him, Mrs Huddlesfield isn’t looking at her husband. She is looking at her only child – thoughtfully, trying to figure out what’s come over Waneeda that she can’t see. And then all the lights go on in the house that is Mrs Huddlesfield’s brain. “It’s that club, isn’t it?” This is in no way a question. “It’s that Clemens Reis! Isn’t he a vegetarian? I’ll bet he is. Look at those glasses of his. And that hat! He’s put you up to this, hasn’t he?” These aren’t questions, either.

Although you wouldn’t expect Waneeda’s mother to forget that Clemens once catapulted a large toy piano into her backyard, it has to be said that she has also never forgiven him for that event. From the moment the piano leg bounced against the back door and made her drop the pitcher of juice she was holding, Mrs Huddlesfield has thought of Clemens as an extremely peculiar boy. Trouble. Not normal. Not unless you live in another world. The kind of boy you want to keep your eye on – so that, years later, when he’s arrested for doing something outrageous and the reporters gather round the house and ask her what he was like as a child, Mrs Huddlesfield will be able to say, Oh, I always knew he was odd.

“It has nothing to do with Clemens,” says Waneeda. “I’ve never even talked about it with him. I made up my own mind.”

This would be a good example of wasting your breath.

“I should’ve known!” cries her mother. “When he came over the other morning like that, I should’ve known something was going on.”

Mrs Huddlesfield is referring to the first day Waneeda went door-to-door with the oak-tree petition with Clemens. He came to get her by climbing over the fence and knocking on the back door. To Mrs Huddlesfield, of course, this was just another example of how peculiar Clemens is. In her retellings of this story, Clemens came over the fence like a gypsy or a burglar. Waneeda’s mother wanted to know why he couldn’t come to the front of the house like anybody else would. And Clemens, sitting down at the table as though he’d been invited, said that he did it because it was quicker.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” sighs Waneeda. “Nothing’s going on.”

Waneeda’s mother isn’t listening. Conversation is largely a solitary occupation for her. “I don’t know why we can’t have neighbours who have normal children,” she continues. “I wouldn’t mind if you were seeing a football player. Or a basketball star.”

“I’m not seeing anyone,” says Waneeda.

“Personally, I’m surprised he could get over the fence,” muses Mr Huddlesfield, who has yet to return to his television show. “He’s not what you’d call athletic, is he? Not exactly All-American material.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen him the other day,” says Waneeda. Surprising herself, she relates the story of Maya’s runaway bicycle and Clemens Reis’ quick thinking and acting. “It was like he was some kind of superhero. He just jumped for her and pulled her off the bike.”

“A superhero who doesn’t eat meat?” Waneeda’s father gives a short, sharp laugh. “That’ll be the day.”

Mrs Huddlesfield continues with her alternative conversation. “He’s not a good influence on you,” she says. “What’s next? That’s what I want to know. Are you going to protest outside of McDonald’s? Are you going to go on demonstrations dressed in a tutu? Is that what you’re going to do?”

As if giving up meat is the first step on the road to anarchy and chaos.

“I’m not sure.” Waneeda nibbles on her lettuce. “Maybe I’ll plant some stuff in the backyard.”

“Plant stuff?” Neither Mrs nor Mr Huddlesfield ever goes in the backyard because they’re afraid of catching Lyme disease. “Plant what?”

“Plants,” says Waneeda. “You know, flowers – and maybe a tree or two. Maybe I’ll even grow some vegetables.”

“Did you hear that Oscar?” shrieks Mrs Huddlesfield. “She’s going to plant vegetables.”

“That’s exactly what you’d expect from a vegetarian,” says Mr Huddlesfield.

Chapter Thirty-Four